Thursday, July 27, 2017

Mumbai: An unusually heavy mobile phone carried by an airline staffer led CISF airport security officials to unearth a gold smuggling plan at Mumbai airport on Wednesday. Security personnel detained the staffer, found carrying about 464gm gold, concealed in the battery slot.
Khan Mohammad Arif was a contract employee of Air India Air Transport Services Ltd (AIATSL), a subsidiary of national carrier Air India, which undertakes ground handling job contracts like loading/unloading passenger bags and manning check-in counters to ready flights for departures/arrivals. There was nothing amiss with the staffer, who walked up to security personnel, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and red tie uniform to undergo routine frisking before he could leave the airport integrated terminal 2, where he was on duty early in the morning. Around 9.45am, he had reached lift 23, used by airport staff, at level 2 of the arrival corridor of T2 at Sahar airport. Entry to the lift is manned by a male and female CISF constable, who frisk all airline staff before they enter.
The AIATSL staffer had two mobiles, which he kept aside as frisking began. When constable Alok Singh Bhadouriya picked up the phones to hand them back to the staffer, he noticed one of them was unusually heavy. The constable told the staffer to switch on the mobile, to which he responded that the phone had no battery. "The constables got more suspicious as to how could the phone be so heavy if it had no battery. He told him to open the phone,'' said senior commandant S K Mohanka.
27/07/17 Times of India